MOST-MENTIONED SPORTS FIGURES
Rather than break down the amount of time a specific athlete or figure was covered, we counted how frequently names were mentioned in the transcripts from the week. The 15 most-mentioned sports people for July 20-26:

Notes

Tiger won something last weekend: Even though the 2012 British Open will be forever remembered as Adam Scott's Sunday collapse, ESPN still managed to spend the most time on Tiger Woods, who was out of contention by the end of the third round of play. Can you blame them? ESPN aired all four rounds of the British Open, and viewers aren't tuning in to watch a guy who has, for most of his career, been labeled as a disappointment. The Open was going to get a significant portion of SportsCenter no matter what, and Tiger means viewers.

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Penn State coverage was hit and miss: ESPN mostly did a good job of its coverage of the Paterno statue removal, followed by the fallout from NCAA sanctions on Monday. Bob Ley did a fantastic interview with NCAA President Mark Emmert and asked some tough questions. That was fine.

The same day the NCAA's sanctions were announced, ESPN had all of the SEC football coaches on the Bristol campus, doing interviews with a variety of radio, TV, and internet outlets. That meant almost every interview with a coach led with a question on Penn State, followed by those coaches doing their best to answer the question as quickly and as blandly as possible. SportsCenter included snippets of these interviews (which totalled a little over 2.5 minutes) on the Monday edition, and they honestly weren't needed. It felt like they were trying to shoehorn promotion for their own content while giving the impression they were covering a news story.

FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL: Get ready. The NFL is coming. I counted at least four instances where the network teased their exclusive, insider look at Broncos training camp this week, highlighted by an interview with Peyton Manning that lasted 7 minutes and 30 seconds. There were also stories on prodigal son Tim Tebow, Alex Smith, and Robert Griffin III. With training camp and preseason games just a few weeks away, that means one thing: more of John Clayton's beautiful face on your television screen.